President François Hollande: Travelling Alone

President François Hollande of France will arrive alone at the White House for a state dinner in his honor Tuesday night. Weeks before departing for the United States, Hollande picked up the phone, called a journalist at the Agence France Presse, and issued a brief statement, “I wish to make it known that I have ended my partnership with Valérie Trierweiler.” This was meant to resolve any speculation as to whether Trierweiler, his longtime companion and France’s “première dame,” would be joining him on the trip in the wake of reports of his supposed affair with French actress Julie Gayet.

But many French were shocked at the brevity and coldness of the dictated message, comparing it to the firing of an employee. Eighteen words—and three of them were ‘I’—several news outlets pointed out.

The French are traditionally less moralistic than Americans in judging the private behavior of their politicians. The vast majority of French agreed with Hollande when he said that the turmoil in his personal life was and should remain a private matter. Some eighty per cent of French in one poll insist that the press paid too much time peeking through bedroom keyholes. But the French do make judgments—sometimes very strong judgments—about the personal conduct of their politicians. In fact, the Gayet-Trierweiler affair has become something of a watershed moment in Hollande’s Presidency, with many French drawing larger conclusions about his character and the parallels between his private and public life. They just aren’t following the same canon as most Americans when they do. Fifty-six per cent surveyed in one poll disapproved of his treatment of Trierweiler.

The French are far more accepting of alternative family arrangements and extramarital dalliances. The marriage rate is at all-time low in France, having dropped by more than half in the past twenty years. More than half of children in France are now born to unmarried couples. France adopted a form of civil union known as PACS in 1999, intended initially to allow gay couples formalize their relationships while denying them full marriage equality—but ninety-four per cent of PACS couples are heterosexual. According to I.N.S.E.E., France’s national statistics office, there are two civil unions for every three marriages. Hollande was quite typical: he had four children with fellow socialist politician Ségolène Royal without ever marrying her—or even signing a PACS. Yet the children bear his last name. He then took up with Trierweiler, a journalist who was divorced with two children of her own. In 2007, he and Royal split up.

None of this hampered his successful election campaign in 2012; he defeated Nicolas Sarkozy, who had himself endured a messy divorce during his 2007 election bid and a highly public affair (and subsequent marriage) to the Italian model and singer Carla Bruni. But many French now claim to see a pattern in Hollande’s behavior reflective of a general weakness in his Presidency. “He never decides anything. He lets events or other people decide for him,” one friend explained to me. “He waited until Ségolène Royal found about his affair with Trierweiler and asked him to move out. He waited until the papers published the photos of his affair with Julie Gayet rather than having the guts to end his relationship with Trierweiler himself and in a more dignified fashion. He has no backbone.”

Others cited one of the weirder moments of public-private psychodrama—a video clip in which Royal, who ran for President herself, in 2006, asks Hollande to marry her. He looks completely stunned and profoundly uncomfortable—at the time, he was almost certainly already involved with Trierweiler—and doesn’t seem to know what to say. “You see, he’s still hesitating,” Royal says, trying to laugh off an unbelievably awkward moment.

Some see a pattern of waffling that is characteristic of his Presidency. Early in his term, in January 2012, Hollande delivered a fiery speech in which he declared that “the world of finance” was his “adversary” and tried to institute a new seventy-five per cent tax rate for the super-rich. But his most recent New Year’s press conference had as its centerpiece a kind of corporate olive branch called “The Pact of Responsibility,” which makes a number of major concessions to French businesses in an attempt to lower France’s high unemployment rate (nearly eleven per cent). He declared a “pause on taxes” last year—and then announced a new ecotaxe, designed to reduce the number of trucks on the road and keep the environmental wing of his party happy. Breton farmers and truck drivers took to the streets to protest the ecotaxe, and he backed down again. When French high-schoolers protested the deportation of a Roma student named Leonarda Dibrani, whose family was in the country illegally, Hollande neither backed his Minister of the Interior, who was applying the law, nor took the risky decision of allowing the family to stay. Instead, he tried to have it both ways by offering asylum to the girl but not to her family, displeasing everyone. And just this week, after Catholic groups took to the streets of Paris and Lyon to protest a gay marriage law he’d proposed, his government announced that it was withdrawing plans to legalize artificial insemination and adoption rights for gay couples. “The obvious lesson,” the left-of-center newspaper Libération wrote disdainfully, “is if you take to the street, this government will back down.”

Whether his policy zig-zagging has anything to do with his personal life is an open question. But his oscillation has reinforced the overall impression of Hollande in office: adrift, without a clear, compelling vision.

Those who know Hollande personally insist that he is a very different man in private. They describe him as brilliant, charming, and surprisingly funny. “I took a work trip with him and he kept us in stitches,” a friend told me. And yet this is not what the public sees. “In my own situation, I cannot show anything,” he told two journalists of Time magazine in a recent interview. If the willful absence of a single word of regret, apology, warmth, or kindness in his eighteen-word communiqué ending his relationship with Trierweiler is the result of a purposeful strategy, aimed at maintaining the dignity of his Presidency, it also succeeded in draining it of any humanity.

Part of Hollande’s problem may be another part of his background. Like Royal and many members of his inner circle, Hollande is a graduate of the Ècole Nationale d’Administration (E.N.A.), a super-selective school of administration that admits and graduates a mere hundred students a year—out of thousands of applications—who go on to fill many of the jobs at the highest level of the French government. This system produces brilliant test-takers, a rarefied élite who often have very little experience of the world outside their own circles. Hollande is considered to be a classic product of the school: an excellent technocrat who went straight from E.N.A. into government, then rose through the ranks of the French Socialist Party. His E.N.A. background, many French say, prepared him to be a good problem solver and party mediator, but he has done relatively little of the “pressing the flesh” that might have given him more of a common touch and an ability to communicate gracefully. He was not even supposed to be the socialist candidate in 2012. Most expected it to be Dominique Strauss-Kahn, considered to be a brilliant and charismatic socialist figure—until his political career imploded under allegations involving sexual assault and prostitution (which he has denied). Hollande became a candidate by default.

Hollande—and France’s politicians—are clearly struggling to figure out the new rules of the game. They moved between the extremes of making marriage proposals on TV and shrinking behind a cone of silence. But in Washington, with Obama, he is seen as a key ally in policy toward Syria and a fellow pragmatic liberal politician trying to promote both economic growth and social justice while also reaching a sensible budget—and with a weak political base. He should feel right at home.

Photograph by Lionel Cironneau/AP.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.